It depends on where you are located. But in most of the area 60cm should be enough, yes.
Posts by pe1chl
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What method do you recommend to adjust an 80cm offset dish towards EsHail sat?
It depends where you are. please change your username to your callsign so it will be obvious in what region you are located.
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He has a 2.3m dish. Of course then you require less power than with a 60cm dish for which the 10 Watt was calculated (which most people immediately doubled due to past experience with pre-published link budgets).
However it appears that there is less power required than estimated, at least when everyone behaves well.
It could become worse when there are many simultaneous QSOs of course.
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It appears that the majority of stations receives with an SDR or at least has the capability to look at an SDR on the side, so I expect that once there is a good reference and understanding of the proper level the situation will be better than in the old days when everyone heard only their own signal and could not easily compare with others.
(it also helps that the downlink signal is so strong that there is no need to make extra power to hear oneself due to local interference on receive)
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Yesterday afternoon with a lot of traffic on transpoder (very strong stations) i think the signal was 6-10 dB weaker. (I did not measure). Is any AGC on the transponder active?
I saw a couple of times that stations transmitted so much power that the AGC kicked in. It was immediately visible because the color of the background noise in the waterfall changes. I'm not sure if there already is AGC action before that effect is seen.
It will be helpful when the beacons are enabled so everyone has a reference for their signal strength, there were a couple of stations that were quite strong compared to average but of course it is difficult to complain as long as it is not yet established what is "too strong".
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I am receiving with 80cm dish, SR-3602 LNB and SDRplay RSP1a SDR using gqrx.
Transponder noise is about 11-12dB above noise floor.
Stations that are shown peaking 15dB above transponder noise in the SDR are very comfortable to copy, 10dB is enough for Q5.
Indeed some stations have 20dB or more which is unnecessary.
Uplink still has to be mounted, I am starting with 40-el yagi and 2 watts via 10m cable.
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Yes it is working really well... I need to mount my uplink antenna so not yet QRV but there are a lot of very interesting QSOs running.
Of course all the wellknown names and experienced hams are there first.
Maybe later we get the "you're 59 73! cq cq cq" traffic.
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I already saw the first station that was making 20dB too much power so hopefully the issue will be taken seriously
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The stable signal seems to be the lower NB beacon.....
It isn't. It is a station (PE1CKK) who does not care about directives given by AMSAT and/or if he is disturbing measurements to be done by the ground station.
He is a friend of Remco PA3FYM who would have done the same thing had he not been away from home at the time.
They are discussing it on the local repeater PI6NOS (available on Echolink)
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Unfortunately, as we already have seen on this forum, the Netherlands is the country of "let's agree to disagree" and "I do what I want no matter what others think about it".
This is again clear when watching the transponder now. No matter how often it was said to not transmit, PE1CKK still does it and even mentions it on the local repeater.
Same for PE9RX.
SHAME!
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That is true. I also have one that I occasionally use to power experiments.
The ripple is not bad, but be careful when using it to power oscillators used in radio equipment...
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And in addition if you are in doubt with your power supply try it with a power bank instead.
You are suggesting a powerbank would not have ripple on the DC?
Think again... the typical powerbank has a single lithium cell and upconverts the internal voltage to 5V using a step-up switching converter.
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I recall the US HD satellite system DirecTV uses an IF of 250 - 750 MHz. To be able to use standard off-the-shelf DVB-S(2) receivers, there is a unit on the market called the BBC, B-Band Converter. This takes the DirecTV IF of 250 - 750 MHz and upconverts it to 1650 - 2150 MHz.
Around 1994-1995 a similar device was used in Europe to receive the new Astra 1D satellite. Until then, LNBs had a 10 GHz LO. The Astra 1D satellite started to use the 10.7-11 GHz band so the IF would start at 700 MHz and existing tuners that started at 950 MHz would not be able to cover it. Converters like the B-Band Converter were sold, I still have one in the junkbox made by Johansson. I plan to use it on Es'hail-2 for my first experiments.
From then on, the standard LNB local oscillator frequency was changed to 9.75 GHz and the frequency coverage of tuners extended upward to 2150 MHz so those converters weren't necessary for newly installed systems.
Except... then the band was extended on the high end and the new 9.75/10.6 switchable LNBs appeared.
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I read it also and I'm surprised about the early date in February. I have nothing read about the tests in Doha and Bochum.
NDA you know... NDA!
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Hi,
recently I made some measurements of the drift of the Pluto SDR after TX start. It was quite substantial an IMHO prohibts using it for FT8. Even for CW and SSB it will require the receiving station to constantly tune his receiver which I do not want ...
Remember the ADALM PLUTO is a learning and experimenting device, not necessarily a wise choice to use as the core of an amateur radio station.
Before you can do that, you need to add external filtering and for such high frequencies maybe a better reference and by that time it could have been wiser to buy a device that is properly constructed for the purpose.
This does not mean it cannot be a lot of fun to tinker with the PLUTO.
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Well, of course you did require some equipment to make the audio understandable, without that you could only hear the cadence of the speaking and not understand much of it.
I'm talking about the 1980's here, that was when we got cable TV and BBC1 and BBC2 were added to it. It was received in Belgium and relayed via microwave links to the Netherlands. There was also a receive station in the Hague I think.
BBC clearly were experimenting with targeted material for subscribers with a box, e.g. for company internal news and instruction videos.
In those days we had a movies channel on cable that required a separate subscription, FilmNet. It was encrypted as well, it used a method where the frames were alternately normal and inverted in polarity and the area around the sync pulse was level-shifted back into the normal video levels. A sync signal was transmitted as AM modulation on the audio subcarrier instead.
The audio itself was not changed, but usually a TV would mute the audio anyway when it could not achieve sync.
There was a control signal on one of the invisible lines that told the decoder if the upcoming frame is normal or inverted.
And then there was a separate data channel at a completely different frequency (75 MHz) to enable/disable the boxes addressed by serial number.
All in all it was quite complicated, and of course the channel had to provide those boxes to the subscribers for free and recoup them from the monthly fees.
And then there were those electronics hobbyists that just cobbled together a decoder from surplus TV modules (tuner, IF, rf-modulator) and some CMOS electronics. Oh well...
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I don't remember Engineering Announcements but I do remember Engineering Tests!
In the old days when I happened to watch TV in the middle of the night I sometimes saw strange experiments on BBC, e.g. experiments with encryption and programmes intended for automatic recording and later playback.
As this was in de days of Analog TV, the encryption usually involved the wellknown inverted-sideband audio.
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Fully agree. Quality.
With that name and price, it is what you should expect.
(well, I would have expected a 10 MHz input. but it could be that it is already very stable without it)
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How can I confirm that I received eshail2? I am dizzy... I used a 120cm antenna with an elevation of 12.2 degrees
You can just wait until the amateur transponder is tested again (or is being opened) and then you can align using that signal. At least you know that you have the correct signal and that the transmit antenna is "global beam" instead of some narrower beam that does not send much signal to your location.
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Here is someone who already implemented CAT control to stabilize the receiver frequency:
